sweetgeorgia

Maybe it was exhaustion… or the smell of sheep and vinegar… or realizing that the finished sweater would look terrible on me… I ripped St. Brigid. Gone is the AS aran sweater. I just figured it would look like I was wearing a giant, wooly purple potato sack. Instead, my fingers crave smooth, sleek, minimal… so I cast on for Wendy’s (Knit and Tonic) “Sizzle”.

The yarn is Estelle Mystik DK (cotton/viscose blend) that I bought the day after Jo’s wedding. Really, the wedding was at the Radisson Hotel in Richmond which is right next to Yaohan and the cute knitting shop with all the Japanese yarns… so of course we had to make a quick visit. Besides, I haven’t bought yarn for myself in ages it seems. This yarn is splitty but the viscose that is blended into it lends the yarn a lovely drape and sheen. Of course, it would be ideal if this were silk but there was none to be found at the shop.

In between knitting and dyeing, I’ve been dressing the loom with more 20/2 silk. I had a lot of silk warp leftover, so I combined them all to make a shawl about 15.5″ wide. This will hopefully be my first foray into all 8 shafts — it will be a block twill (I think that’s what it’s called).

I’ve also made several warps in various stages of readiness. The plan is one warp on the loom, one warp ready to go, one warp ready to dye, and one warp marinating in my head…

The purple and black warp is all hand-dyed silk (Cascade from Henry’s Attic, 2000 ypp) that will become a log cabin scarf. This is based on an article from an old Handwoven magazine. The “pattern” calls for an 8-dent reed but I just have the one 10-dent reed so I’ll have to see how I can get “16 epi” out of that reed — I know that either 15 or 17 are possible.

The pile of blank silk is 20/2 Bombyx silk in three different chains, each with 230 ends. I’ll handpaint each one with similar colours and combine them into a 690 end shawl, sett at 30 epi that should give me a shawl about 22″ wide. This warp is 6 yards long — enough to make two shawls. Again, the idea is a block twill on eight shafts.

I know that all of July, I thought “Oh, after the wedding I’ll have more time… after the wedding…” but it seems like that’s not the case. There’s always more work. There’s always more stuff. There’s always too much to knit and never enough time. But maybe it’s not about trying to find more time. It’s about simplifying. Paring down. Minimizing… meanwhile, I just found at least four new things I want to make from Rowan’s Fall issue.

Crap.